Live8

Aid concerts are usually about raising money and using that money to benefit a specific charity or charities. Live 8 doesn't seem to be about that.



Okay, so free tickets doesn't seem to translate into a lot of money raised. TV, advertising, memorabilia sales? Maybe that'll cover the cost...

So it's not about raising money for aid. Okay. So what are it's stated goals?

From the BBC:



Okay, this is a POLITICAL concert, now I get it.



Damn, I must be getting old, because I have had enough of the bloated self-importance that rock stars ooze from every pore when they tell us how relevant they are and how they are going to show us the way to solve all our problems because the profession of "rock star" allows one special, unique insight into geopolitics and international economics without requiring more education than the vaunted level of "high school graduate", but somehow impedes appropriate personal grooming and hygiene.

Can't any of them just shut up and play good music anymore?

Time to turn to the boring economists to figure out why this is all wrong-headed:



...and provides an incentive for those countries to renege on their debts. "You forgave country X. Why not us? We can be just as incompetent at spending this money as they were."

I'll just add, have you ever met anyone with staggering credit card debt? If they ever managed to get out from underneath that mountain, through negotiations with creditors etc. without actually paying what they owed, what's the first thing that they'll do with their hard-begged financial freedom?

Set a budget?

Live within their means?

Never do it again?

Or get more credit cards and rack those babies back up to the limit again?

Debt is a drug, and it's highly addictive.

So we forgive African debt without tying that forgiveness to any true democratic reform of those countries, because of course doing something like that would be talking down to them, wouldn't it? How dare we arrogant Westerners actually require some kind of permanent attempt to fix the problem? No, it's all our fault in the greedy west, isn't it?

What happens after debt-forgiveness when tin-pot African dictators come knocking on the doors of Western banks looking for loans for the latest "economic development" scheme (ie. the Army needs bullets to put down dissidents)? Do we loan them the money again?

"We're debt-free!" they'll say. "How can you not help us?"

If we don't loan them the money we in the West will be labeled cruel and unfair.

If we do, we'll be fools.

If we give them the money without political changes in Africa we're back to square one, and some future Geldof will be lecturing my kids about how it's their fault that Africa can't do anything economically right -- how starving children are the West's fault exclusively, and not how constant war, oppression, racial genocide, corruption, incompetence, mismanagement, absence of human rights and enabling-Western guilt-money (ie. foreign aid) had anything to do with it.

We'll be back here in this position again in twenty years, with septuagenarian baby boomers - who'll still have their bootheels on the necks of popular culture I might add - yelling at us about how the Africa of 2025 will need yet another round of debt-forgiveness.

Don't get me wrong. I think that third world debt should be forgiven somehow - but not without actual, real democratic and political reform attached, or it's all pointless.

Red Ensign Standard XXIV

A Chick Called Marzi is the hostess with the mostest this time out. Linkages gallore from the Red Ensign Brigade.

China Cracking Down on Blogs

Fellow Red Ensign Blogger myrick writes from Shanghai:



We talk about the "freedom" of the internet. Well here, it seems, that freedom isn't an absolute.

The collaborators that myrick names are Cisco Systems, Alcatel, and Juniper Networks - who are selling China the routers needed to secure their newly upgrade internet services.

From the second link above is an exerpt from a quoted article:



I've had arguments in the past about not doing business with totalitarian regimes. Often I've come down on the side of free trade. You know, the idea that wealthy nations trading with poorer nations allows us access to cheap goods and allows poorer nations access to high tech and higher wages (higher relative to those they could earn if the market was restricted to internal trade only) and that eventually the freedoms and prosperity enjoyed by the richer society will be demanded by the poorer society of its own government thereby enacting real and demonstrable democratic reforms yada yada yada. They have to know us in order to understand us and want what we have and take for granted every day.

In general, I still believe this. My only moral restriction in this regard used to be the armaments trade. But there are other products that can be used to enslave a population besides guns and ammo...

What if the high tech being sold to China is being used to enslave and indoctrinate, or at the very least silence dissent? And what if the companies involved KNOW that their "secure" equipment is being used to "secure" free speech from the Chinese people?

In the 21st century, mere bullets aren't the only things that can kill and enslave.

UPDATE: Kate at The Last Amazon takes a harder line.

CBC Rue?

Rue's podcasts have been tapped for a pilot show for [gasp!] the CBC.

I may soon be losing my dear wife to the minions of state radio.

Whoever shall listen to my ranting and raving in person??

Burning my Spock ears

A conversation at Slashdot.org is discussing the recent decision that the scifi channel is going to pick up the show Firefly and run the episodes never seen before in the U.S.:



The last few seasons of Voyager cured me of my desire to by default watch anything with Star Trek in the title. I was beginning to despair of finding good science fiction on TV.

Then came Farscape. Then they took it away.

I gave Enterprise a chance and was bored. I left after about 3 episodes. I came back. Saw that they were discussing some crap about a "temporal cold war" and decided my time was too valuable to waste despite the two female leads as eye candy...

Then came Firefly. Then they took it away.

Then came the new Battlestar Galactica...and we have to wait a damn long time before we can see season 2 here in Canada.

But if season 1 is any indication it will be worth it.

But please God: let Star Trek rest in peace for awhile!

The Emperor Will Be Displeased

Future Giant Laser Threatened by Cuts



Talk about life imitating Star Wars.



"How am I going to blow up Alderaan with four measly laser beams!"



You'd think if they'd already spent $2.8 billion on it and are about to see the fruits of completion that they'd cough up the remaining change to finish the project.

Now if we had a mobile space station to mount it on...

Not a Criminal

CRTC approves satellite radio

Thanks guys, for officially sanctioning what thousands of us have been using by nefarious means for the last few years.



Oh, I see. Hoops. Hoops to jump through.

And quotas.

There's a recipe for success.

A 9:1 ratio? Great. So we'll see if the Canadian market is really all that important to Sirius and/or XM radio. Considering that there's rumours of bandwidth problems (ie Sirius is running out of it - don't know about XM) we'll see what channels get dumped to make room for this awe-inspiring Canadian lineup.

As long as it's not just 8 different feeds of the CBC running through my radio.

Depending on how this plays through, there will still be many Canadians who do the cross-border shop like I did almost two years ago.

Book Meme

I was tagged three times:

• by Taylor


• by Victor


• by Nicholas

So to put this to bed, here's my version of this list:

1. Number of Books that I own:

-- Now that I look at the bookcases it seems like my books and Rue's have gotten together and multiplied, kinda like us. I'm quite scared.

Exclude old textbooks from university and courses that I have no purpose for (-42)
Exclude computer books (-6)

So, let's see...do the count...177...sure, why not? One hundred and seventy-seven hardcover and paperback books strewn over two tall bookcases (my books aren't allowed on my wife's bookcases)...

2. Last Book Purchased:

Devil Take the Hindmost, A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor. A damn good read about periods of "irrational exuberence" and the fallout that occurs when those periods inevitably end. Anyone caught up in the whirlwind of the Internet bubble will recognized themselves in an earlier incarnation during the South Seas bubble of the early 1700s. A good primer on why the human race doesn't learn from its mistakes when fabulous prizes are there for the tempting...

3. Last Book Read:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahaniuk. When I saw this in the library I had to take it out for a spin. As a fan of the movie, the picture in my mind was already coloured by pre-conceived images, but it was still entertaining as hell, and in my opinion, one of the best book to film adaptations to date that I have seen.

4. Five Books that mean Something to me:

I. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens - Assigned for high school reading, I practically devoured this book in 3 days and was bored for the rest of the English classes that were given to us to complete the readings...There are plenty of literary criticisms as to why this is a great book, so I'll spare you that discussion. Suffice to say that I had a rather unhealthy fascination with Sydney Carton, and the "heroic sacrifice."

II. Chris Taylor mentions the Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester - I thought these were great books, but for my money the Aubrey-Maturin novels (all 20 of them) are better, for the simple reason that author Patrick O'Brian paints a more complete picture of the early nineteenth century using an incredible attention to the details of everyday life. Plus there's a lot more humour and joie de vivre in the boisterous Jack Aubrey, than there is in the uncomfortably stoic Horatio Hornblower.

III. Dune by Frank Herbert. One of the first "serious" sci-fi classics I ever picked up, and one of the few books I have been compelled to read and re-read over and over again. Forty years after it was first written it remains as powerful and imaginative and complete as any book I've ever read.

IV. Barbarians At the Gate by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar. At the time it occured, the buyout of RJR Nabisco was the largest leveraged buyout in history...When I first picked this book up, I was convinced that businessmen were superior, God-like, and infallible. This book taught me otherwise. It was also entertaining as hell. HBO made a quasi-fictional adaptation of it starring James Garner. One of the best books showing how the best-laid business plans can be shot to hell in the blink of an eye.

V. The Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. Yeah, I know. More sci-fi. A powerhouse book. A difficult read. An ending that made me read earlier chapters over and over again for clues and pieces of the puzzle so the whole thing fit together. And made me an addict for more of Banks' novels set in the Culture universe.

5. Five more victims:

• Paul Jané at Frozen in Montreal


• Ben of Ben's Blab


• John the Mad


• James of Hammer into Anvil


• Paul of Light and Dark

Knowledge is Power

Personal Data for 3.9 Million Lost in Transit



Great. Just great.



Gone. They're gone. At the very very least this is a gold mine for unscrupulous marketers - at the worst...



And the banks look at me funny when I question why they need my Social Insurance Number.



Except that they don't know where these tapes are.

So something you don't have and don't know the location of and have no idea if you are ever getting back...wait a second let me start again...can't believe how mind-bogglingly stupid that statement is...so if your car disappeared from your driveway overnight, you'd just assume that there was no indication that the car had been stolen or that any of the compact discs in the glovebox had been compromised.

Who let the braintrust at Citicorp make this statement? How do they know the data isn't compromised?